Ford says selling 10 Focus Electrics in three months is "on track"

From the looks of things, the Ford Focus Electric has decidedly poor sales. In fact, according to numbers that Green Car Reports is reporting – and Ford is not denying – only 10 units have been sold since the car went on sale late last year: seven in December, three in January and none in February.

Now, we knew that widespread sales were pushed back until September, but isn't the car available in California and New York/New Jersey already? Could the $39,200 price be driving people away, even though the car qualifies for up to $10,000 in tax incentives in California ($7,500 elsewhere)? Is it a problem of supply or incredibly low demand? Do low all-electric vehicle sales imply anything about future plug-in vehicles from the Blue Oval.

We asked Ford about these numbers, and Ford's Wes Sherwood told AutoblogGreen that only select fleet customers have been able to buy the Focus EV thus far. He said:

We are on track with the Focus Electric launch. We began by selling a small number of vehicles to a few fleet customers. We are now ramping up retail production to begin selling vehicles to retail customers in New York, New Jersey and California in the first half of this year. We then will expand sales to 16 other markets later this year.

We continue to expect sales of all-electric to be small even when we ramp up retail production. This is new technology, and it takes time to take hold. Remember, initial hybrid sales were slow. We remain confident about electrified vehicles for the future and are working to make the ownership experience enjoyable. We still expect 10 to 25 percent of Ford's global sales will be attributable to electrified vehicles by 2020. This includes hybrids, plug-in hybrids and pure battery electric vehicles, with most sales coming from hybrid electric vehicles.

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If you're Pagani, an average of 3 cars per month is just about right. OTOH, if you're Ford, and your sales were 7, 2, 1, that's not so good. Let's look at other first month sales: 19 Nissan Leaf 326 Chevy Volt 500 Fiat 500s Look at it this way: if Ford continues to sell 3 cars every couple months, by the end of the year, they'll have a good chance to catch the Leaf's first month sales.

I've seen one on the road already. It had a manufacturer plate though. I doubt Ford really expects to sell all that many, outsourcing the production work to Magna is something you do for short run vehicles, not high volume ones.

Magna did the bulk of development work, but the car is being built on the same production line as all other North American Focus models. Ford will be able to adjust production as demand rises or falls.

Not true unless they crush all the prior cars and then don't make the i3. BMW has been very honest with their customers unlike GM to the EV1 owners. Point of the post was to show that folks are clamoring for well made EV's and when done right will go like hotcakes. Cheers Peder

Wow. This car is not yet on sale. WTF are they talking about? Does Green Autoblog just cut and paste no matter what the article says? Anyone with half a brain would think, hmm, I have seen no announcements that they are going on sale. No ads. No press conferences. Yet this article says there are sales, bad ones. Maybe i should use my brain and investigate. Then when I paste it I can tell people what I found to either confirm or put the lie to the article.

Actually they really love German stuff here. If Volkswagen announced a new Diesel that releases 4 billion parts per billion of smog, opposed to 5 billion, ABG will report on the virtue of VW and how green the car is. My fav was a Bentley concept with a W12 engine - but it had start/stop or some such, so was reported as 'green.'

These guys want to say controversial things to stir us up. They sit around in staff meetings and measure the number of hits for each article, the number of comments, and look for ways to drive both up. People always respond more to negatives and controversies so this is top shelf feeder for them LOL Now if they can just find a way to get us to fight about sales of non-existent hydrogen fuel cells as opposed to existing and non-existing battery cars with some "sales figures" on each for the first half of this year....we can make their day really happy. Throw in some evil crap from Darrell Issa, a little big oil vs coal for EVs and we can shoot for 250 comments!

Wow. It has been available for sale but only 10 takers? Ouch. Yeah, as someone mentioned once, if this thing came out a few years back we would be praising it. But in a world with the Volt, Leaf, Tesla Roadster, and Mitsubishi-i already on the market? Well, then it is just an over-priced late entry kludgy conversion with no trunk space. The only thing it really has going for it is that it looks better than the Leaf to many.

Spec, What part of .... " We began by selling a small number of vehicles to a few fleet customers. We are now ramping up retail production to begin selling vehicles to retail customers in New York, New Jersey and California in the first half of this year. We then will expand sales to 16 other markets later this year." ...do you have difficulty in understanding? It's evident that Ford are quietly introducing the Focus EV to a controlled market and gauging the feedback prior to expanding sales. The Focus EV, is very much a marketing exercise for Ford. Ford can't afford the luxury of 'loss leader' models, and has very limited budgets and resources for developing new models. Ford is still servicing massive debt, and although the last few years have seen profits, Ford is still recovering from the financial damage of the Nasser years.

Anonymous

3 Years Ago

A NJ dealer quoted me a 6,000 dollar added dealer markup over sticker in December. That kind of attitude may have something to do with the lack of sales. Clearly they do not really want to build or sell these. And then they wonder why folks buy foreign brands.

The Chevy Volt is doing OK at the same price point, despite the Rabid Right doing everything in their power to destroy it. But yeah, Ford isn't on the ball here. At a Volt MSRP, the FFE is priced too high for a BEV, and tacking 15% ADM is simply ridiculous.

@Lefty: to be fair, the "Rabid Right" is less than 5% of the right-leaning population. The problem is that they're the d-bags with the megaphones. OTOH, the smug little think-they-know-it-all and think-they-know-what's-best-for-you liberals are about 80% of the left-leaning population... I hate the a-holes on both ends of the spectrum.

Anonymous

@Leftyloon Facts are facts. It was rightie Bob Lutz that actually used the term loony right and brought up the rabid dog analogy. Deal with it. http://green.autoblog.com/2012/03/13/bob-lutz-continues-his-chevy-volt-defense-offensive/

If they really wanted to move this car, they have to have a lot of commercials like the Volt, and the price tag of the Leaf. If they did those 2 things they would have the fastest selling all electric car. period.

"This is new technology, and it takes time to take hold." WTF?!? My 2000 Ford Ranger is 99% of the technology that is in this new Focus EV except my NiMH battery has way more real world miles on it than lithium automotive batteries. All the systems in my Ranger, regen, AC motor drive, high voltage HVAC, HV power steering, battery management per battery/cell , range estimation and guages etc, are all the same as the new Focus. In fact my Ranger has zero bed space taken up by the battery pack, can't say that about the trunk space of the Focus. My Ranger has had lots of problems that I had to address that I hope are Ford has addressed in the new Focus. I have had multiple charger failures, terrible choice of water pump that goes out every 9000 miles, traction inverter failues due to a $5 part that was speced wrong, wheel bearing failues etc. All of these issues I tried to tell Ford about, they didn't want to even acknowledge my concerns. No problem Ford, my brand new Leaf looks fantastic parked next to my EV Ranger in the garage. Bring out the new Fusion Energi with E85 capability and a 6.6KW charger for less than $40K and that might tempt me, but feh my Ranger is still going strong after 56K+ miles.

And how many do they have in stock? If they have 500 of these sitting around and no one is buying them then there is a story. Has anyone seen any of these at a dealership yet? No. So this is a delay, but they don't want to call it a delay.